The integration, demonstrated on the UI campus and on a farm at Aroro-Yerokun, Ibadan, involves using poultry and pig waste to raise maggots to supplement fish feeding and using a stocked fish pond (earthen) to cultivate lowland rice at least three times in a year, reports NigeriaTribune.

Project Coordinator and Head of the Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries Management, University of Ibadan, Dr Kolawole Ajani, said the project was subdivided into two: integration of fish with poultry and rice farming, and integration of fish with pig and rice farming for smallholder farmers.

According to Dr Ajani, the aims of the project include developing viable and sustainable aquaculture with rice and poultry for rural farmers and to eradicate hunger.

The project will train 60 farmers from the South West and it would subsequently be replicated in other zones.

Professor Bamidele Omitoyin of the department and research team member said the issue of research in agriculture could not be over-emphasised. “For what you have seen indicates that research is pivotal to development of agriculture in any country and Nigeria is not an exception. Without proper research, there can be no real development. All the technologies we are promoting today are all products of research and they will be sustained by research and that is the reason why the government should fund research.

“The problems that the stakeholders have discussed, particularly in terms of quality fish seed, will only be solved by research because you have to go into fish genetics, breeding and development of good quality parent stocks. If you have good parent stocks, you will have good seeds. Without good stocks, you cannot have good seeds.”

He said the project could be up-scaled into large scale farming, depending on variables of suitable land availability, resources, extended research and ingenuity of farmers and investors.